ANOTHER SOLDIER GONE TO GLORY

Here is what Fred Mitchell had to say about Vaughn Miller, the Member of Parliament for Golden Isles and Minister of the Environment who suffered a sudden death in the wee hours of Sunday 28 September 2025. Rest in peace:

Barbara Cartwright, our Secretary General, gave me an early morning call,

it’s midnight. I’m in New York, and she says: “you wouldn’t believe this but Vaughn Miller has passed away…

Then the formal things have to click in, because you have

to make sure that next of kin are notified before the news gets out publicly. So it was the Secretary General’s sad duty and responsibility to call Mrs. Miller at 1 o’clock in the morning and explain what had happened to the best of our knowledge information and belief.

It is difficult in this current environment to contain news, and people are insensitive to the feelings of family and friends. The news had to be managed and an announcement had to be made. The Prime Minister had to be called. All of those things had to happen within the short space of time before the country woke up at 6 o’clock or so.

That’s one of the roles you get as chair of the party… I appreciate the opportunity that you and all the other people have given to me that allows me this privilege to be here to speak on behalf of the Progressive Liberal Party. I welcome you all here this evening, at this wonderful service for our friend and brother, whose name was reverend Vaughan Miller MP.

I say to people that if you do the math, the 39 people who end up in Parliament are something like 0.0975% of the population. When you get that job, you are in a very special group. It is a thankless job… but it is a job that people do where they contribute their life’s work and time to make this country the successful country that we have.

There is a writer whose name is John Steinbeck. He wrote a book called Of Mice And Men. It is taken from a line in a poem by Robert Burns, and the line says that the best laid plans often go awry. You can plan, however you like, we don’t know the day or the hour.

Shakespeare reminds us that all the world’s a stage and every man has many parts in his life, and we have our exits and our entrances and the question is, what do we do in the time that we have on the stage? And Vaughn Miller, as you heard today, when it was his time on the stage stepped up and did what was right, and proper.

He stood up on the national stage and said, no, it’s not gonna happen that way. He refused to support the increase in VAT proposed by the government of which he was a part.

When Vaughan Miller did what he did, I think that signaled to the country, we can do this, we can do this. The PLP can win the government despite how all the odds looked.

Jackie Kennedy said after her husband died in 1963, that for one brief shining moment, there was a place called Camelot. In our own history, this one brief, shining moment was that of a man standing up in Parliament, saying “I may lose my salary. I’m gonna lose my job, but I must do what is right for the Bahamian public. ”

Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 4 October 2025 up to midnight: 1,453,414;

Number of hits for the month of October up to Saturday 4 October 2025 up to midnight: 527,496;

Number of hits for the year 2025 up to Saturday 4 October 2025 up to midnight: 28,072,757;